Applied Ontology - Volume 10, issue 3-4

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ISSN 1570-5838 (P)
ISSN 1875-8533 (E)

Impact Factor 2018: 0.774

Applied Ontology focuses on information content in its broadest sense. As the subtitle makes clear, two broad kinds of content-based research activities are envisioned: ontological analysis and conceptual modeling. The former includes any attempt to investigate the nature and structure of a domain of interest using rigorous philosophical or logical tools; the latter concerns the cognitive and linguistic structures we use to model the world, as well as the various analysis tools and methodologies we adopt for producing useful computational models, such as information systems schemes or knowledge structures.

Applied Ontology is the first journal with explicit and exclusive focus on ontological analysis and conceptual modeling under an interdisciplinary view. It aims to establish a unique niche in the realm of scientific journals by carefully avoiding unnecessary duplication with discipline-oriented journals. For this reason, authors will be encouraged to use language that will be intelligible also to those outside their specific sector of expertise, and the review process will be tailored to this end. For example, authors of theoretical contributions will be encouraged to show the relevance of their theory for applications, while authors of more technological papers will be encouraged to show the relevance of a well-founded theoretical perspective. Moreover, the journal will publish papers focusing on representation languages or algorithms only where these address relevant content issues, whether at the level of practical application or of theoretical understanding. Similarly, it will publish descriptions of tools or implemented systems only where a contribution to the practice of ontological analysis and conceptual modeling is clearly established.

Applied Ontology aims at being a major publication forum for theoretical and applied research in a variety of topics, tentatively grouped together in research areas, examples of which are indicated in the list below.

Abstract: Modularity is being increasingly used as an approach to solve for the information overload problem in ontologies. It eases cognitive complexity for humans, and computational complexity for machines. The current literature for modularity focuses mainly on techniques, tools, and on evaluation metrics. However, ontology developers still face difficulty in selecting the correct technique for specific applications and the current tools for modularity are not sufficient. These issues stem from a lack of theory about the modularisation process. To solve this problem, several researchers propose a framework for modularity, but alas, this has not been realised, up until now. In this…article, we survey the existing literature to identify and populate dimensions of modules, experimentally evaluate and characterise 189 existing modules, and create a framework for modularity based on these results. The framework guides the ontology developer throughout the modularisation process. We evaluate the framework with a use-case for the Symptom ontology.
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Abstract: Ontology-driven conceptual modeling (ODCM) is still a relatively new research domain in the field of information systems and there is still much discussion on how the research in ODCM should be performed and what the focus of this research should be. Therefore, this article aims to critically survey the existing literature in order to assess the kind of research that has been performed over the years, analyze the nature of the research contributions and establish its current state of the art by positioning, evaluating and interpreting relevant research to date that is related to ODCM. To understand and identify any…gaps and research opportunities, our literature study is composed of both a systematic mapping study and a systematic review study. The mapping study aims at structuring and classifying the area that is being investigated in order to give a general overview of the research that has been performed in the field. A review study on the other hand is a more thorough and rigorous inquiry and provides recommendations based on the strength of the found evidence. Our results indicate that there are several research gaps that should be addressed and we further composed several research opportunities that are possible areas for future research.
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Abstract: After more than two decades since the interdisciplinary field of ontology emerged for information science, it is now poised to make a huge impact. The ontological approach aims at making intended meaning explicit and computable. By enabling better human–machine “understanding” across complex socio-technical chains, ontologies are facilitating the vision of co-evolution of humans and their tools. Applying ontology requires a very broad spectrum of disciplines and skills, and is therefore best tackled not by individuals, but by communities of people working collaboratively. This position paper attempts to trace the brief history of ontology communities from the author’s vantage point,…identifying some of the key dates and key players (mostly familiar names, but some unsung heroes as well) that have made things happen for the field of applied ontology. Inspired by Doug Engelbart’s “bootstrap” strategy, the author has developed and operated (until his recent retirement) a virtual collaborative environment (CIM3.net ), on which some ontology communities (such as Ontolog and Ontology Summit) have thrived. Observing that the funding and career opportunities have changed for the better in the past few years, the author reflects on how the ontology communities of practice might leverage what they have built so far, and take applied ontology into an even better future.
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Abstract: This paper analyzes the similarities and differences between an ontology (focused on meaning), and a database schema (focused on data). We address questions about purpose, representation, creation, usage and semantics of each. We distill out twenty-five features that characterize these two representational artifacts, the majority of which are relevant to both. Each has a strong semantic heritage using formal logic to build conceptual models of some subject matter. And while there are differences in 90% of the features, the differences are mostly historical, not technical. We identify pros and cons for each, and notice that there is usually no free…lunch. The disadvantage that you think you are getting rid of may show up elsewhere in a different and unexpected way. We close by considering how ontology contributes to enterprise data integration. The emergence of using URIs as global identifiers (e.g. in OWL) dramatically enhances data integration as well as schema reuse and sharing. The primary focus on meaning helps ontology break through a lot of unnecessary complexity that exists in large traditional databases and greatly simplifies the process of integration. Ontology is providing a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel for enterprise-wide data integration.
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Abstract: This paper describes a long-term research program on developing ontological foundations for conceptual modeling. This program, organized around the theoretical background of the foundational ontology UFO (Unified Foundational Ontology ), aims at developing theories, methodologies and engineering tools with the goal of advancing conceptual modeling as a theoretically sound discipline but also one that has concrete and measurable practical implications. The paper describes the historical context in which UFO was conceived, briefly discusses its stratified organization, and reports on a number of applications of this foundational ontology over more than a decade. In particular, it discusses the most successful…application of UFO, namely, the development of the conceptual modeling language OntoUML . The paper also discusses a number of methodological and computational tools, which have been developed over the years to support the OntoUML community. Examples of these methodological tools include ontological patterns and anti-patterns ; examples of these computational tools include automated support for pattern-based model construction, formal model verification, formal model validation via visual simulation, model verbalization, code generation and anti-pattern detection and rectification. In addition, the paper reports on a variety of applications in which the language as well as its associated tools have been employed to engineer models in several institutional contexts and domains. Finally, it reflects on some of these lessons learned by observing how OntoUML has been actually used in practice by its community and on how these have influenced both the evolution of the language as well as the advancement of some of the core ontological notions in UFO.
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Abstract: Signs and reality are the two fundamental topics of ontology. Reality is whatever exists independently of how we think about it. Signs are those aspects of reality that living things use to interpret, act upon, and communicate about reality. Every signal in a neuron, every thought in a brain, every bit in a computer, and every symbol in any language, natural or artificial, is a sign. Since signs are also part of reality, signs of signs are the part of reality that includes every branch of science including ontology itself. For applied ontology, that distinction is embodied in digital computers:…everything in a computer is a sign, either of the outside world or of other signs inside. Aristotle introduced a theory of signs, which he related to language and logic, the medieval Scholastics extended it, and Peirce developed it as the foundation for ontology. His semiotic addresses important issues that have been neglected by the mainstream of 20th century analytic philosophy.
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Abstract: This paper investigates an issue at the interface between language and ontology. It is argued that the phenomenon of ‘inherent polysemy’ observed in lexical semantics for nouns such as book or country actually is a deeper phenomenon grounded on specific ontological relations involving the entities referred to. It is shown that this phenomenon emerges not only in language but also in most available ontologies. Beyond the ‘dot types’ used in some linguistic theories to account for logical polysemy, it is proposed to introduce ‘complex categories’ in ontologies in order to solve incoherence and inconsistency issues appearing when this…phenomenon is not acknowledged and to characterize complex categories on the basis of formal ontology relations.
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Abstract: Online user feedback is principally used as an information source for evaluating customers’ satisfaction for a given goods, service or software application. The increasing attitude of people towards sharing comments through the social media is making online user feedback a resource containing different types of valuable information. The huge amount of available user feedback has drawn the attention of researchers from different fields. For instance, data mining techniques have been developed to enable information extraction for different purposes, or the use of social techniques for involving users in the innovation of services and processes. Specifically, current research and technological efforts…are put into the definition of platforms to gather and/or analyze multi-modal feedback. But we believe that the understanding of the type of concepts instantiated as information contained in user feedback would be beneficial to define new methods for its better exploitation. In our research, we focus on online explicit user feedback that can be considered as a powerful means for user-driven evolution of software services and applications. Up to our knowledge, a conceptualization of user feedback is still missing. With the purpose of contributing to fill up this gap we propose an ontology, for explicit online user feedback that is founded on a foundational ontology and has been proposed to describe artifacts and processes in software engineering. Our contribution in this paper concerns a novel user feedback ontology founded on a Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) that supports the description of analysis processes of user feedback in software engineering. We describe the ontology together with an evaluation of its quality, and discuss some application scenarios.
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Abstract: Historical documentary heritage has a high potential for supporting citizens’ awareness of their culture and identity. However, to exploit this potential, access tools are needed, which integrate data from heterogeneous sources and provide an effective user interaction. Moreover, historical archives can become a useful and attractive cultural resource, if they are exploited in popular contexts, such as education and tourism: Innovative ICT-based applications can employ documents, pictures, etc. to guide students and tourists in the discovery of interesting stories, connecting the present to the past, and providing a larger audience with a “live” access to original cultural heritage resources. In…particular, we claim that this scenario can be enabled by providing ICT tools with a rich semantic layer, based on computational ontologies, in which the notions of event and role play a major role. Such a semantic layer can be further enriched by exploiting resources available in the Linked Open Data cloud.
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Abstract: Over the last years, numerous ICT applications with mechanisms to detect situations have been developed to support disaster management (DM), which is a field of a great societal and economic importance. Those applications are termed situation-aware (SA) because they try, in near real-time, to perceive and comprehend a situation of some type (e.g. disease epidemics) and project a reaction to the detected situation (e.g. isolate diseased people). An obstacle to the modelling of SA applications is the lack of well-founded structural and temporal constructs, which is inherent to conventional design techniques. Ontology-driven conceptual modelling has been successfully applied to overcome…this issue, where ontological analysis based on a foundational ontology supports the modelling of concepts within a specific field as a well-founded core ontology. In this paper we discuss the importance of a well-founded core ontology for DM to support the specification of SA applications. We give an overview of the comprehensive framework we are developing, in which the DM core ontology plays a prominent role in the development of SA applications. In particular, we discuss the challenge of harmonizing concepts related to the modelling of situations in a foundational ontology in the lights of the Barwisean situation theory, Situoid theory and Situation awareness theory. This challenge has to be addressed to properly support SA applications in DM.
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Abstract: Roles are important both theoretically and practically for modelling the world around us. Although many theories of roles have been proposed, there remain aspects which are little understood. In this paper we investigate roles and their contexts from a temporal point of view. We introduce the idea of a family of occurrent-dependent roles as a means to organise prospective and retrospective derived roles around an original role from which they are derived. By this means we account for the existence of groups of similar roles which are difficult to distinguish without a careful analysis of the temporal aspects. Following detailed…informal discussion, we present a preliminary formalisation of the key concepts and relations.
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